Photoshop is the tool most people name when they talk about image editing, and that breadth is exactly what makes it hard to brief. It will do almost anything to a photograph. The useful question for a commercial catalogue is narrower: which of those things actually change how a listing performs, and which are better handled at the shoot or in another tool entirely.
What Photoshop genuinely earns its place doing
Three jobs account for most of the work that reaches us, and all three are Photoshop jobs in the proper sense – they need pixel-level judgement that no batch process reproduces.
Retouching
Skin, fabric, metal and glass each fail differently under studio light. Retouching is the work of removing what the camera recorded but the eye would never have noticed: a stray thread, a dust mote on a lens filter, a fingerprint on a polished surface, a crease that the steamer missed. Done well it is invisible. Done badly it is the plastic, over-smoothed look that makes a product read as fake, which costs more trust than the original blemish ever would.
Masking and cut-outs
Separating a subject from its background sounds mechanical, and for a hard-edged product on seamless white it nearly is. The difficulty lives at the edges: hair, fur, mesh, chiffon, the soft fall-off around a translucent bottle. A clipping path handles the first case in seconds. The second needs an alpha mask built by hand, and the difference shows the moment the image lands on a coloured marketplace background.
Compositing
Putting a product into a scene it was never photographed in – a new backdrop, a different surface, a shadow that matches a light source that was not there – is where Photoshop has no real competitor. It is also where the work is easiest to get wrong, because a composite only holds together if perspective, colour temperature and shadow direction all agree.
What is better handled elsewhere
Plenty of corrections that people send to a retoucher should never have reached one.
Global colour and exposure belong in Lightroom or Capture One, applied across the whole shoot at once. Correcting exposure image by image in Photoshop is slower and produces less consistency, not more.
Alignment and framing are cheapest to fix on the day. A tripod mark on the studio floor costs nothing; re-cropping four hundred images to match afterwards costs a day.
Anything that changes what the product is – reshaping a garment, inventing a texture, removing a manufacturing defect that ships with the item – is a returns problem waiting to happen, whatever tool produced it.
A simple test before you brief
Ask whether the correction is describing something the camera got wrong, or something the product got wrong. The first is post-production. The second is a conversation with the supplier.
Briefs that hold that line are quicker to price, quicker to turn around, and far less likely to come back for a second revision round.